Thursday 7th december at 10pm Xing presents at Raum PETER, a performance by the performer and choreographer Peter Mills, as an output from his Bologna residency.

Peter Mills’ PETER is an extensive body of work using the self as axis to create. Turning the production of self into choreography, using activity as a critical point of departure to disuse social, political, philosophical and artistic phenomena.

Peter is now preparing a new piece, that will be explored at Raum, for which he wishes that PETER, the title and author of the work, promises an authority but does not deliver, as the work moves between points of relevance and attention not allowing or promoting any one attribute as more important. In an almost ironic fashion PETER and its material use language, convention, and hierarchy as a means to keep moving and eventually gather around something else. Could the promise of instability of meaning provide a language so malleable, so dynamic and shifting that it would not get stuck in the binary of included and excluded. Nothing would become religious nor sacred, the gathering would amass around individuals' experiences, enabling the shift and redefinition of the focus of the performance, together with others. Could such a dynamic provide the possibility for a slight gasp, a unarticulated noise or expression of discomfort or insecurity to become present and relevant as "bare life"? In the first step of the project, PETER, 6 minutes, which premiered behind the curtains of Stockholm's Opera House stage, Peter used distraction to re-choreograph the audiences' attention and gaze, challenging their production of value and assumed meaning. The orchestration of the attention moved the performative mode between formal and informal, putting the situation into question, into flux. It is this space in between which he's interested to explore in his Bologna residency.
"In uncanny expressions, gaps are created and filled, connections made in unexperienced ways." This is the mood in which Peter delves his guests. "Deconstructing the experience of meaning production, and cultural manufacture. Doubting convention with the experiencing of other voices, and cultures yet to be. Emphasising accessibility in difference, and specificity rather than generalisations. Juxtaposing the performance itself with conventional performance which is static and reproducible. PETER opens up for specificity of location, time, audiences and their unique relations, by doubting the very existence of PETER."